He never became a doctor like he always wanted to, but Gov. John Kasich won Ohio doctors’ Voice
of Medicine award yesterday “for his outstanding leadership in the area of health-care reform.”

“To me, being a physician is the absolutely greatest job anyone could have in our society,”
Kasich told about 200 gathered for the Ohio State Medical Association’s annual meeting at an
Easton-area hotel. “The Lord gave you a brain, and it was a brain that was designed to heal people.
I mean, can you think of anything better than that?”

Kasich credited the association for being “the tip of the spear” in battling Ohio’s drug
problem. Although some doctors in the 1990s began overprescribing painkillers, the group is
developing new protocols to avoid that problem. Kasich said his advisers wanted him to make the new
rules mandatory instead of voluntary, but he told them, “No, no, no, we’re not going to treat
professionals like that.”

The governor’s anti-drug advocacy helped win him the award, as did a Medicaid expansion that he
pushed through despite legislative opposition, plus patient-centered care and a proposed increase
in the tobacco tax as part of the midbiennium review he proposed last month, association spokesmen
said.

Although the doctors group took issue with items in the two-year budget that Kasich signed last
year that mandated certain medical procedures, most of them related to abortion, the association “
didn’t really focus on that,” said Tim Maglione, senior director of government affairs.

Audience members applauded when Kasich mentioned almost in passing that doctors probably want
government to stay out of the practice of medicine.

They also applauded when the governor said near the end of his 18-minute speech: “I would love
to see primary-care doctors get more money.”

There was no clapping when he talked about the need for cost efficiency and said: “In Columbus,
we have more heart hospitals than we have hearts.”

The governor’s former state health director, Dr. Ted Wymyslo, also took home an award as the
medical association’s physician advocate of the year for his advocacy of patient-centered care.